


Hummel Boys' Day Out

by somebetterwords



Category: Glee
Genre: Family, Fluff, Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-02
Updated: 2015-10-02
Packaged: 2018-04-24 11:40:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4918147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somebetterwords/pseuds/somebetterwords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It was a little lonely, Burt could admit, to be the only one in the house who wasn’t talented in that way, but his wife and son were both so damn brilliant with their music and their paintings and everything else they attempted, he was happy to sit back and watch them shine.</p><p>And for one special time of the year, there was one very specific art form where Burt Hummel reigned supreme."</p><p> </p><p>  <a href="http://somebetterwords.tumblr.com/post/130353724069/hummel-boys-day-out-complete">Read on Tumblr.</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Hummel Boys' Day Out

**Author's Note:**

> I was supposed to be working on ASITA but then I saw the first prompt for [kurtoberfest](http://kurtoberfest.tumblr.com/) AND _The Best Day_ by Taylor Swift started playing, so what was I supposed to do?? Nothing, there was nothing I could do.

Since the moment his little boy was old enough to speak, Burt realized his son was an artist. Even before that, really. Because as soon as his little boy was old enough to make noises come out of his throat, he was already controlling the pitch and tone of those noises. His lilting baby babble was amazingly effective for conveying emotion. And that wasn’t just paternal pride talking, really. It reminded Burt of lyrics to that ABBA song. _Mother says I was a dancer before I could walk, she says I began to sing long before I could talk._ Well, father would say the same thing.

Honestly, Kurt probably would have mastered the art of walking five feet without tripping a lot faster if he hadn’t been so insistent on incorporating twirls (“Per-wets, Daddy!” “Pirouettes, Kurt. Pir-ooh-etts.” “Thank you, Mommy. Pirouettes, Daddy!”) to the journey. But his kid was stubborn, and he was no quitter, and he handled failure gracefully, so twirl he did.

Burt…  He wasn’t an artist. He had tried picking up a guitar to pick up girls once, many moons ago, but quickly realized that a nice smile and a letterman jacket was effective enough that he didn’t need to be that asshole sitting on the grass and warbling his way through The Joker. Nobody calls you Space Cowboy, asshole. They call you asshole. Art had been an elective in school, but he had gone with shop class instead, and that got him where he was today. Even as a kid, when he was Kurt’s age, blocks and toy trucks were his whole world.

Kurt liked toy trucks a whole heck of a lot too, but his tended to have freshly sharpened crayons in the bed. And god help the poor soul who tried to help him put those crayons away during cleanup time, because Kurt had a _system_ , and he organized by colour, and Pacific Blue was not the same thing as Cerulean so maybe it would be better if you handled the Play-Doh, Daddy, there’s only three colours for that stuff. (He couldn’t pronounce Aunt Mildred’s name, but _Cerulean_ was easy-peasy. Burt was pretty sure his kid was a little sneak, but he was a damn cute one, and Burt would pretend like he couldn’t pronounce her name if that were an option for him too, so he let it slide.)

Burt wasn't an artist like Kurt was, but Burt could accommodate, and he could nurture his son’s gifts. He could sign Kurt up for ballet lessons— he wasn’t allowed to take Kurt to the lessons anymore after the _altercation_ with that other father who thought it was okay for a grown man to laugh at an innocent child, but Kurt hadn’t been kicked out of the only dance school in Lima, so even if that school wasn’t good enough for his son, it was a win. He could swing by the Jo-Ann’s on the way back from the library story circle and let Kurt root through the remnants bin. He could suck up to Aunt Mildred in the hopes that she would give them her little upright piano that she never played anymore but held onto out of spite (spiting who exactly, he didn’t know. Family feuds were real and they weren’t worth his time or energy.) He could even eat the cookies that Kurt and Katie weren’t able to decorate to their impeccable standard— it was a tough job, but someone had to do it. It was a little lonely, Burt could admit, to be the only one in the house who wasn’t talented in that way, but his wife and son were both so damn brilliant with their music and their paintings and everything else they attempted, he was happy to sit back and watch them shine.

And for one special time of the year, there was one very specific art form where Burt Hummel reigned supreme.

**

“Rise and shine, kiddo!” Burt sang out as he pulled open the curtains.

“G’morning, Daddy,” Kurt mumbled, rubbing his eyes as he got his bearings. As soon as he was awake enough to sit upright, he crawled out from under the covers and stretched his arms out for Burt to pick him up.

One of these days they would have to wean him off of the expectation that Mommy and/or Daddy would always carry him around if he wished it, but today he was sleep-mussed and looking especially tiny in his footie pyjamas and beaming at Burt like his existence brightened up Kurt’s whole life (the reverse was true), so today was not that day. “Good morning to you too, Kurt!” Burt scooped him up into his arms and smooched a pink, chubby cheek. “Do you know what today is?”

“Sunday,” Kurt said sagely.

“That it is,” Burt agreed. “Specifically, it’s the first Sunday of the month. Do you remember what that means?”

“Hummel Boys’ Day Out! Are we gonna go to the place with vases? I wanna make a bowl this time.”

“Nope,” Burt shook his head as they entered the bathroom, setting Kurt down on the stool in front of the sink and reaching for Kurt’s toothbrush and paste. “We’re going some place brand new today. Let’s get you ready.”

**

“You’re really not gonna tell me?” Kurt asked over his bowl of oatmeal.

“I am not,” Burt confirmed, taking a deep sip of his coffee.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Really, _really_?”

“Really, really, _really_. Finish up your breakfast; we both know how long you take to pick out your own outfit.”

“You forgot my orange juice, Daddy.”

“No OJ today, kiddo,” Burt told him, grabbing a napkin to wipe off Kurt’s face.

“Whoa,” Kurt looked like his world was rocked by this change to his daily schedule. “Did we run out? Are we going to the grocery store?”

Burt chuckled. “The grocery store is hardly special enough for Hummel Boys’ Day Out.”

**

“You need to wear sturdy shoes today, okay? And layers, short sleeves but a sweater on top. It’s getting chilly out.”

Kurt nodded with a determined look on his face and marched towards his closet to pick his outfit. Burt tasked himself with making the bed.

“Daddy, I can’t reach!”

Burt set down the last stuffed animal before making his way over to Kurt. “Which one?”

“The goldenrod cardigan,” Kurt said, pointing imperiously up at a shelf.

“Magic word, Kurt.”

“The goldenrod cardigan, _please_.”

Goldenrod had ‘golden’ in it, so Burt started for the bulky yellow thing on the left hand side, tugging sharply when he didn’t hear a correction. It was smooth sailing getting Kurt dressed for the day until they hit accessories. “Can we trade this out for a regular tie, buddy? I’m afraid I don’t know how to tie a bowtie.”

“But this matches the bestest! Maybe there’s ’structions? When Mommy does the laundry sometimes she needs to read the tags and the tags are really, really big for just telling people how to wash stuff.”

“Yeah, but those tags are usually washing instructions in a couple of different lang— oh.” Well, bless those helpful souls at Gap Kids. Burt pored over the diagram a few times before turning Kurt around to face the mirror and working over the boy’s shoulder. “Lemme know if it’s too tight,” he murmured. He had to pause to pull the tag back out and look over the instructions before tucking it back in a couple of times, but Burt got the job done. He didn’t get the job done _well_ , but it was done. “How’s that?”

Kurt looked at his reflection intently before twirling back around to face his dad. “It’s crooked, but you tried your best and I love you very much. I’m sure next time you’ll do better.” He patted Burt’s cheek comfortingly.

“Thank you, Kurt.” Burt tried his best to look solemn and not crack up. “I love you too.”

**

The best thing about having a kid as musically minded as Kurt was that he never had to play the Are We There Yet game on longer drives. He just needed to pop in a cassette of good tunes and Kurt would lose himself in it, totally immersed in learning the words to a new song or singing along if it was familiar.

“And I’m free!” Kurt sang, perfectly in-tune and who even knew how many keys higher than Tom Petty. “Free fallin’! Yeah, I’m free! Free fallin’!”

The second best thing about having a kid as musically minded as Kurt was that he was open to a little diversity in his listening tastes. Burt couldn’t even count the number of times he’d sat amongst fellow parents commiserating over how their children threw a tantrum whenever they tried to rotate in a few non-Disney, non-nursery-rhyme tracks. He had never in his life been so grateful to have no idea what everyone was talking about.

**

“Is this a farm?”

“That’s exactly right, son,” Burt said, taking hold of Kurt’s hand as they strolled along. “Y’know those red barn things your mom takes you to for the extra fresh strawberries sometimes?”

“Uh huh.”

“Well, those strawberries come from here.”

“I thought you said we weren’t going to the grocery store!”

“We’re only gonna stop and buy some fresh fruits and veggies for a little while, then there’s fun stuff!”

“It’s okay if we’re only here for groceries, Daddy. This is an extra special grocery store, so it still counts for Hummel Boys’ Day Out.”

They ended up spending some two odd hours picking fresh produce and taking two trips back to the car to pack their stuff away, but the day was still young.

**

Lunch was barbecued chicken, barbecued sweetcorn, barbecued everything, a few bits of caramel for dessert, and a tall glass of fresh-pressed cider.

“It’s like apple juice but a million times better! Can I have another glass, please, please, please?”

Burt knew it was probably a bad idea, but he had nixed the orange juice specifically so Kurt wouldn’t crash from the sugar. And also, stronger men would crumble in the wake of that face.

“Okay, but you have to drink it really, _really_ slowly.”

“Yay!” Kurt bounced in his seat so fast he was practically a blur.

Burt bought a half-gallon to take home and cursed himself the entire time he paid for it.

**

“Oh my goodness, that’s a tractor!” Kurt hopped out of Burt’s arms and scampered over, running a hand over the giant back wheel and circling around it in awe. “This is a tractor, right? Like the one in my book.”

“Just like the one in your book.” He grabbed Kurt by the hand and walked them to the wagon hitched to the back. “It’s gonna take us for a ride.”

“Do we ever get tractors in the shop?”

“Nah, farm stuff is normally taken care of in a different shop than ours. We get cars and motorcycles and vans and sometimes trucks.”

“Daddy, we should move here and take care of tractors instead of cars! Then we could have cider and barbecue all the time.”

“They don’t have a mall out here, buddy. Is that a trade-off you’re willing to make?”

“Oh… I guess barbecue is a sometimes food. Can we come visit again though?”

“That, we can definitely do.”

**

Burt totally made the right call on letting Kurt have the second glass of cider. Kurt burned up the entire sugar rush trying to lead them out of the corn maze. For all his many gifts and talents, an innately good sense of direction was not one of them.

**

“Take a deep whiff; do you smell that?”

“Smells like Mommy’s candles.”

“That’s because Mommy’s candles smell like pumpkin. And some other stuff, but mostly pumpkin. Now, we’re about to pick some right out of the field, and I need _your_ eye for detail when we do this, okay?”

“You can count on me,” Kurt said, topping the sentence off with a salute.

“I know I can,” Burt said with a smile. “The most important thing I want you to look for is colour. It should be a nice bright orange all the way around, with a green stem that’s still fully attached. If you see any brown bits or cuts or you feel any soft spots, move on to the next one. Second is shape and size. Nothing too tall and skinny, okay? It’s gotta be squat and round, and we’ll test to see if the base is flat. And we want every pumpkin to be at least as big as my head.”

“With or without the hat?”

Burt pondered that for a moment, patting over his own skull. “With the hat,” he decided. He bent down so Kurt could get a feel of the scale. “When you see one you like, knock on it gently with your knuckles and listen. It should make a nice thunk sound.”

Kurt tapped his knuckles softly against his own skull and mimicked the noise with a silly smile. “Thunk thunk,”

“Just like that, pumpkin.” Burt tapped Kurt’s nose with the end of his forefinger. “Any questions?”

“How many are we getting?”

“As many as we can carry.”

**

Burt was wrong before. Kurt actually used up all the excess energy darting from pumpkin to pumpkin (to pumpkin to pumpkin and then back to a previously abandoned pumpkin) on his quest to find the perfect ones to meet his exacting standards.

**

“Daddy, I can carry one of the big pumpkins.”

No, he couldn’t.

“You sure? These things are pretty heavy, kiddo.”

“I’m sure!”

“Positive?”

“Positive!”

“All right, then.” Burt stopped and swapped the little guy in Kurt’s little arms for one of the big ones in the crate he was carrying.

Kurt made it a third of the way to their car.

“Daddy, my arms hurt. This is too heavy.”

**

Kurt was asleep by the time they got home, helped along by Simon and Garfunkel turned down low. Burt was immensely grateful for his little boy’s good timing. He unstrapped Kurt from his carseat, carried him in to the living room, got him out of his outer layers, and set him down to finish out his afternoon nap. Burt used the down time to unload the groceries and put them away, wash the pumpkins, and even got to take a ten minute snooze of his own before Kurt started stirring.

**

Burt had Kurt separate the Friday newspaper sheets while he cleared the kitchen table and got their supplies ready. They covered the dinner table with the sheets, and then set two of the pumpkins down on their sides. “I want you to draw a circle on the bottom of both these bad boys,” Burt said, handing Kurt a thin-tipped Sharpie. “It’s gotta be big enough for my fist to fit through.”

He held his fist up against the first, keeping it there while Kurt drew a circle around it. Kurt just eyeballed it for the second circle, and his guess was perfect.

Burt grabbed the biggest knife he had set out and cut the openings for both pumpkins quickly, eager to get to the fun part already. He set the bottoms aside and put down a large, stainless steel bowl.

“Take a peek through the hole, what do you see?”

Kurt crouched down from where he was kneeling on the chair and peered through. He turned to face Burt with a furrowed brow. “A bunch of goop?”

“Yep,” Burt nodded. “It’s called pumpkin brains, normally, but you’re not wrong. We’re gonna be real careful not to scrape the inside walls of the pumpkin, and we’re gonna scoop all the goop out of the shell and into this here bowl.”

Burt stuck his hand in his pumpkin to demonstrate, pulling out a fistful of brains and dropping it in the bowl with a wet plop.

Kurt gingerly stuck his hand in his own pumpkin, then stared at Burt with excitement-widened eyes. “It’s _squishy_!” He squealed with delight. He dropped his handful of goop into the bowl, then stuck his hand in the bowl to play with it some more. “Squishy, squishy, squishy,” he sang to himself as he continued emptying the cavity.

Burt let Kurt de-brain both pumpkins, because even if the actual carving was a bust, he was clearly having a blast.

**

“Do I have to make it a scary face?”

“That’s what’s traditional, but you don’t have to. We’ve got more than one pumpkin for you. Do you have something specific in mind?”

“Uh huh.” Kurt didn’t elaborate beyond that, just uncapped his sharpie once again and stuck a tongue out as he concentrated on the gourd in front of him.

“All right, just remember—”

“Draw small because we cut along the outside, thick spaces between the cutouts,” Kurt let out an exasperated huff, like he was put out that Burt thought he needed to be told twice. “I _got it_ , Daddy.”

If he was this put out by a gentle reminder now, Burt rued the day his three-year-old became a too-smart-for-his-own-good teenager.

**

“You’re sure about this? Once we cut, we’re committed.” Burt stared at the blobs drawn on Kurt’s pumpkin. Maybe he was entering his abstract phase?

From where Kurt was seated in his father’s lap, he nodded decisively. His little hand gripped the carving knife, covered and controlled by Burt’s on top of it.

“Off we go, then.” Burt placed Kurt’s hand on the top of the pumpkin, blanketing in with his own.

**

Burt had a pretty good idea of what it was by the time they got to the last little blob, but he needed a little time to soak it all in.

Kids Kurt’s age usually weren't able to draw a family portrait where you could tell the dog apart from the sun in the background. Kurt drew and carved what was clearly discernible as a family portrait on a goddamned _pumpkin_. And it was better than the photo above the mantle that they had got taken at the Sears studio.

“We’re gonna vaseline the edges and sprinkle some cinnamon inside, and then it’s bath time for you.”

“But I thought we’re gonna light it.”

“We will, but we gotta wait until it’s dark out. It’ll look prettier that way, dontcha think?”

“Oh, they go outside?”

“They sure do, that way everyone who passes our house can see your art.”

“Good,” Kurt nodded. “The world needs to appreciate my talents.” He turned around in Burt’s lap to face him. “And yours too!” He said with a bright smile. “You’re the bestest jack-o’-lantern-er in the whole wide world.”

Burt leaned down to plant a kiss on the crown of Kurt’s head. “I’m just glad I got to do my jack-o’-lantern-ing with you.”


End file.
